NOTE: The schedule is subject to
change and will be updated regularly as changes occur. The latest update was made on 9-7-06. If there are any scheduling conflicts for your session or questions of any kind, please contact Tara Penry.

WEDNESDAY, 25 October

1–4 Executive Council Meeting River Fork

4–7 Registration 2nd Floor Landing

5–6:30 Executive Council Dinner Cottonwood Grille

7:15-10 Welcome Evergreen Tara Penry, WLA President

Silent Film: Back to God’s Country, starring Nell ShipmanIntroduction byTom Trusky, Idaho Film Collection
Original Score Performed by Bijou Orchestrette

Reception

THURSDAY, 26 October

8–3 Registration 2nd Floor Landing

8–5 Book Exhibit Aspen

Thursday 8–9:15 Session One

1A (Evergreen) Mary Clearman Blew and Western Feminism

Chair: O. Alan Weltzien, University of Montana, Western

Sarah Hulme, Utah State University: “Mending Geographies: Mary Clearman Blew’s Balsamroot”
Susan Rowe, Boise State University: “Isolation and Identity in All But the Waltz”
Cassie Hemstrom, Boise State University: “The Rebirth of the Sow in the River: Creating a Narrative of Choice in Mary Clearman Blew’s Writing Her Own Life”
Evelyn I. Funda, Utah State University: “The ‘Threat to the Common Herd’: Monsters in Mary Clearman Blew’s Writing”

Jennifer J. Clark, University of Southern California: “As Honest as the Horse Between My Knees: Slavery, Horsemanship, and Stewardship in the Western Novel”
Tamas Dobozy, Wilfrid Laurier University: “ ‘Between You, the Coyotes and the Crickets a Thought Don't Have Much of a Chance': The Artificial Frontiers of Sam Shepard's True West”
Lauri Chose, Indiana University of Pennsylvania: “Writing Arctic Animals: Forging the Connection”
Andrew Wingfield, George Mason University: “Stalking the Mountain Lion”

Angela Glover, University of Kansas: “Jim Burden, Lost in Space: How Liminality and Temperament Theory Work to Produce a Tragic Ending in Willa Cather’s My Antonia”
Margaret Doane, California State University, San Bernardino: “‘Bridled by Caution’: Community-Enforced Conformity in Willa Cather’s Nebraska Novels”
Mark Hartvigsen, Boise State University: “‘Geography is a terribly fatal thing sometimes’: Determinism in O Pioneers!”

1F (Clearwater) The Trouble with “Black” and “White”

Chair: Michael K. Johnson, University of Maine, Farmington

Brian Flota, George Washington University: “Whose Country Is It? Ishmael Reed and Percival Everett’s African American West”
Katie Rawson, University of Mississippi:
“Roping Uncle Sam’s Canon: Narrative Voice and the American Myth of the West in The Life and Adventures of Nat Love”
Amber Leonard, Leeward Community College: “A Place in Paradise: Perceiving (In)authenticity in Tara Bray Smith’s West of Then”
John Escobedo, Rice University: “The Racial Logic of White U.S. Mestizaje in Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don”

1G (Ivy) Reading Western Fiction by Genre

Chair: Jill Heney, Boise State University

John Donahue, Concordia University: “Zane Grey’s Idaho, The Border Legion, and Deadwood”
Paul Varner, Oklahoma Christian University: “Twenty-first Century Paperback Westerns”
William Katerberg, Calvin College: “At Home in Utopia: Time and Place in Utopian Science Fiction set in the American West”
John C. Davies, Bishop Grosseteste College & Portland State University: “Western Feeling, Feeling Western: The Novels of Molly Gloss”

1H (Suite 214) Making Home In A Restless World: Perception, Representation, Preservation

Chair: Liz Stephens, Utah State University

Brandon R. Schrand, University of Idaho: “Curating Memory: Seeing Home as a Tourist”
Rob Kunz, Utah State University: “Growing Pains: The Battle over Land and Family in the Shadow of the Tetons”
Liz Stephens, Utah State University: “American West Heritage Center: The Selling of a Lifestyle, The Commodification of a Dream”
Denice Turner, University of Nevada, Reno: “Flying Home: Finding a Place in the Space of the West”

Thursday 9–10 Coffee Break (Aspen)

Thursday 9:30–10:45 Session Two

2A (Evergreen) Emotion in the Western Classroom: Workshop and Conversation

Co-chairs: Tara Penry, Boise State University, and Michelle Payne, Boise State University

Jerry D. Mathes II, University of Idaho: “Classical Tricksters and Judge Holden’s Malevolent Power”
Steven Coughlin, University of Idaho: “Landscape of the Tricksters”
Joshua Cilley, University of Idaho: “Trickster Fools in Blood Meridian”
Sean Prentiss, University of Idaho: “Convergence and Divergence of Tricksters in Blood Meridian and Winter in the Blood”

3H (Cedar) The Academic Library of the Future: What’s In It for the Literary Scholar?

Chair: Thomas Peele, Boise State University

Donald Barclay, University of California, Merced
Alan Virta, Boise State University
Denise Shorey, Northwestern University
Larry Kincaid, Boise State University

3I (Grove Lobby) Basque Block Tour

Preregistration required. Cost: $5. Also offered Wed 10/25—1:30 pm.
Meet at Grove Hotel lobby and walk across Capitol Blvd to Basque Block. This tour will only appear in the final program if a sufficient number of members have preregistered for it. Space limited.

Thursday 12:15–2 Past President’s Address & Luncheon (Evergreen)

12:15 Luncheon
1–1:45Address: William Handley, University of Southern California

Open seating will be available at 1 pm for those who wish to hear the address only. All WLA registrants are welcome to attend at this time.

Michael L. Johnson, University of Kansas: “Wildfire: A Taste of Authenticity”
Bob Lyon, Bellevue, Washington: “Blowups: Fact and Fiction in Firefighting”
Christopher McGill, Boise State University: “Wildness Wherever: Social Subversion and the Wilderness Experience of Charles Bowden’s Blood Orchid”
Susan J. Tyburski, Colorado School of Mines: “Seduced by the Wild: Audrey Schulman’s Journey into the Arctic Heart of Wilderness”

4E (Ivy ) Proto-Westerns and Early Westerns

Chair: Lawrence I. Berkove, University of Michigan, Dearborn

Nicolas Witschi, University of Western Michigan: “‘I do not like newspaper notoriety’: Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, The James Gang, and the Op-Ed Autobiography”
Jefferson D. Slagle, St. Bonaventure University: “The Heirs of Buffalo Bill: Performing Authenticity in the Dime Western”
Seth Bovey, Louisiana State University, Alexandria: “Pulp Fiction, Gangster Films, and the Beginnings of the Noir Western”

4F (Suite 214) Reading and Teaching Intermountain Western Women

Chair: Pamela Steinle, California State University, Fullerton

Ron McFarland, University of Idaho: Title pending
Christine Shearer-Cremean, Black Hills State University: “No Place to Raise a Girl: The Destructive Secular Wilderness of Kim Barnes’s In the Wilderness”
Susan Swetnam, Idaho State University: “Western Family Romance as Western Political Manifesto: Grace Jordan’s Home Below Hell’s Canyon”
Yvonne Rutford, University of Wisconsin, Superior: “Anger Issues: A Reflection on Teaching Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge”

4G (Suite 320) Insiders, Outsiders, and Their Stories of Place

Chair: Karen Uehling, Boise State University

Jamin Casey, Montana State University: “Living in the Landscape: The Relationship between a Sense of Being Local and the Attitude toward the Landscape It Generates”
Hal Crimmel, Weber State University: “A Place in the Sun: A Northerner Meets the Desert West”
David Mogen, Colorado State University: “Boom and Bust”
Jacoba Mendelkow, Utah State University: “Tractor”

Melissa Bowles, Utah State University: “‘If I Had Children’: May Swenson’s Poetic/Motherly Work”
Amy Baird, Utah State University: “In the Shelter of the Tortilla: The Role of the Kitchen in the Art of Carman Lomas Garza and in Elva Trevino Hart’s memoir, Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child”
Dan Holtz, Peru State College: “Marion Marsh Brown Country: A Worthwhile Stop in Nebraska’s Literary Geography”

Dorys C. Grover, Texas A&M University, Commerce: “Vardis Fisher and the Death of Meriwether Lewis”
Megan Jensen, California State University, Fullerton: “Embedded in the Soil: The Treelessness of the Tallgrass Prairies Through 1862”
Ann Lundberg, Northwestern College: “The Origin of the Black Hills: Native Stories and Geological Narratives”
Lee Schweninger, University of North Carolina, Wilmington: “‘Something to Wail About’: A Literature of the Whale and the Makah Hunt”

5F (Ivy) Interpreting Texas and the Literary Plains

Chair: Diane Quantic, Wichita State University

Susanne George Bloomfield, University of Nebraska, Kearney: “First Inhabitants”
Daryl W. Palmer, Regis University: “Plains Emotion: What Willa Cather Made of Kansas”
Chen Xu, Hangzhou Dianzi University, People’s Republic of China: “An Interpretation of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove”
Kyhl Lyndgaard, University of Nevada, Reno: “Collaboration, Competition, and Relocation in the Life and Works of Edwin James”

5G (Suite 214) Narratives of Mormon Gender and Resistance

Chair: Christine Edwards Allred, Eagle, Idaho

Kacy Lundstrom, Utah State University: “The Seductress and the Seduced: Notions of Gender in Samson and Delilah”
Russ Beck, “The Missionary Position”
Heather Robison, University of Washington: “Interstices of Religion, Politics, and Land Management in Rural Nevada; or, A Mormon Girl Gone Left”

Friday 9–10 Coffee Break (Aspen)

Friday 9:30–10:45 Session Six

6A (Evergreen) Periodicals, Politics, and Western Feeling

Chair: Chadwick Allen, Ohio State University

Marcia Hensley, Western Wyoming Community College: “‘Hats Off to the Girl Who Has Staked Out a Claim:’ Journalists Promote Single Women Homesteaders”
Nicole Tonkovich, University of California, San Diego: “Public Letters and the Allotment of Indian Lands”
Chadwick Allen, Ohio State University: “Tonto on Vacation; or, How to be an Indian Lawyer”

6B (Cedar) Feeling on Film

Chair: Len Engel, Quinnipiac University

Jette Morache, College of Southern Idaho: “Short Story to Screenplay: The Significance of Salmon and Community in Smoke Signals”
Len Engel, Quinnipiac University: “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: Sam Peckinpah’s Macabre, Over-the-Top, Morality Tale”
John M. Gourlie, Quinnipiac University: “Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby: The Deep Heart’s Core”
Jennilyn Merten, University of Utah: “Don’t Cry For Me South Dakota: Deadwood, Brokeback Mountain, and the 21st-Century Western”

6C (Rapids) Under European Eyes: Real and Imagined Wests in European Texts

Chair: Neil Campbell, University of Derby

Neil Campbell, University of Derby: “The Delirious Outside:
Rem Koolhaas and the Architecture of Western Studies”
John Beck, University of Newcastle: “‘The Eyes Want to Close’: European Appropriations of the American Desert”
Pierre Lagayette, Sorbonne University: “Visions of the West in French Comics: From Cliché to Critique”

6D (White) Women and the Popular Western

Chair: Victoria Lamont, University of Waterloo

John Clayton, Independent Scholar: “The Lady Writer and the Lady Doc”
Victoria Lamont, University of Waterloo: “The Doctor Was No Lady: The Woman Professional in Caroline Lockhart’s The Lady Doc”
Christine Bold, University of Guelph: “Women in the Frontier Club”

6E (River Fork) Myths, Truths, and Translations from California and the Southwest

Stephen Cook, California State University, Sacramento: “Sadness for No Reason: Tom McGuane’s Existential Struggle”
Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma: “Dream Dump and Artist’s Burden: Sex, Death, and Art in the Hollywood of The Day of the Locust and The Loved One”
Kerry Ahearn, Oregon State University: “Elliot Paul's Modernist West”
Edgar H. Thompson, Emory & Henry College: “Battles in the Kingdom of Fear: Hunter S. Thompson at Home in the West”

7D (White Water) The Territory of Aesthetics: Toward a New American Sublime

Chair: Colin M. Robertson, Nevada Museum of Art

Colin M. Robertson, Nevada Museum of Art: “Inventing the Sublime: Contemporary Artists’ Responses to the History of an Idea”
Phillip David Johnson II, University of Nevada, Reno: “Looking for Hope:Assessing the Sublime and the Picturesque in Postindustrial Places”
Anne M. Wolfe, Nevada Museum of Art: “Engineering the Sublime: Visual Representations of Water in the American West”
Terre Ryan, University of Navada, Reno: “‘Plantations of God’: Sentiment, the Sublime, and the Aesthetics of Clearcuts”

7E (River Fork) Western Nationalisms and Internationalisms

Chair: José Aranda, Rice University

Susan Kollin, Montana State University: “Before the Western was a Noun”
Lourdes Alberto, Rice University: Title pending
Elixabete Ansa-Goicoechea, University of Indiana: “The Deep Blue Memory: A Reformulation of Basque National Identity in the Western United States”
Elaine E. Limbaugh, Portland State University: “The Australian/American Connection”

7F (Clearwater) Unconventional Western Women Writers

Chair: Judy Nolte Temple, University of Arizona

Judy Nolte Temple, University of Arizona: “‘Fixing’ Baby Doe: The Writer Behind the Legend”
Alison Reuschlein, University of Arizona: “Mary MacLane as Revolutionary/Reinscriptionist”
Lauryn Bianco, …: “The Queer Body as Interruption in The Bean Trees”
Taylor Mariah Johnson, University of Arizona: “Legacy of Action: Julia Butterfly Hill’s New Western Narrative”

7G (Ivy) Western Poetry, Poetics, and Politics

Chair: Jennifer Ladino, Creighton University

Bill D. Toth, Western New Mexico University: “No Fission in Peggy’s Pond: The Poetry of Peggy Pond Church and Niels Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity”
Sarah Stoeckl, Utah State University: “The Poetical is Political: Community and Political Activism in the Poetry of Anne Waldman”
Maure L. Smith, Utah State University: “Place-based Poetry: May Swenson’s Westernness”
Michael Gorman, Lincoln, Nebraska: “The Poet Laureate and American Pastoral Ideology”

Friday 12:30–1:45 Session Eight

Kathleen Boardman, University of Nevada, Reno: “Whose Story? Talking about Ethics in the Autobiography Class”
Drucilla M. Wall, University of Missouri, St. Louis: “The Voice in Four Directions: American Indian Memoir in the Writing Classroom”
John T. Price, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Anyway, Back to Me: Addressing the Myth of Solipsism in the ‘Placed’ Memoir”

8B (Cedar) Deadwood and Emotion

Chair: Michael K. Johnson, University of Maine, Farmington

John Smith, Clemson University: “Reading Lessons: Steering the Narrative in Deadwood’s ‘Suffer the Little Children’”
Chad Hammett, Texas State University: “Milch and Me”
John Dudley, University of South Dakota: “‘Land of Oblivion’: Abjection, the Body, and the Western Narrative in HBO's Deadwood”
Michael K. Johnson, University of Maine, Farmington: “Queer Spaces and Emotional Couplings in Deadwood”

8C (Rapids) John Steinbeck and His Contemporaries

Chair: Stephen Olsen-Smith, Boise State University

Stephen Cooper, Troy University: “The Dust Bowl Revisited: William Humphrey’s A Time and a Place”
Jessica Bremmer, University of Southern California: “Refiguring Steinbeck’s California: What if Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown Had Come First?”
Susan Shillinglaw, San Jose State University: “Steinbeck, Ricketts and the Ecology of Place”

8D (White Water) Animals in the Literary West: Intimacy and Agency

Chair: Sarah E. McFarland, Northwestern State University

Diane Guichon, University of Calgary: “Life Savers, Steak, and Mirrors: Animal Representations in Fred Stenson’s Lightning”
Merit Kaschig, College of William and Mary: “‘Dumb Dogs and Dick(ie)s’: Inter-specific Intimacy vs. Procreative Agency in the Western Literary Imagination” Rebecca Onion, University of Texas at Austin: “Lead Dogs and Heroic Masculinity in the New Age of Celebrity”
Sarah E. McFarland, Northwestern State University: “Performing Timothy Treadwell: How the Bears Made the Man”

8F (Clearwater) New Mexico and the Southwest: Magic, History, Authenticity

Chair: TBA

Audrey Goodman, Georgia State University: “Open Graves and Magical Borderlands in the Fiction of Arturo Islas and Luis Alberto Urrea”
Don Scheese, Gustavus Adolphus College: “The Presence of the Prehistoric in Literature and Art about Bandelier”
Eric Chilton, University of Arizona: “‘An Exact Reproduction’: Narratives of Authenticity in Mary Colter’s Grand Canyon Architecture”
Robert W. King, Utah State University: “Modernity’s Pilgrims: The Search for Authenticity in The Professor’s House and Heritage of the Desert”

8G (Ivy) Western Aesthetics in Art and Literature

Chair: Jan Widmayer, Boise State University

Michael A. Brown, Creighton University: “Galaxy (1949): Jackson Pollock’s Other Wyoming Landscape”
Mary K. Stillwell, University of Nebraska, Lincoln: “Chiaroscuro: Light and Shadow: The Aesthetics of Place and Time in the Work of Ted Kooser”
Allan Juhl Kristensen, University of Newcastle: “PrairyErth: The Aesthetics of the Deep Map”
Jenny Emery Davidson, College of Southern Idaho, Blaine County: “Looking in the Corners for a Regional Aesthetics: Contemporary Western Literature and the Drawings of James Castle”

8H (Suite 214) Anticipating and Revisiting Brokeback Mountain

Chair: Sara Spurgeon, Texas Tech University

O. Alan Weltzien, University of Montana, Western: “Standing before Brokeback Mountain: Queering the Northern Rockies”
Sara Spurgeon, Texas Tech University: Title pending
David Peterson, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “‘Everything built on that’: Landscape and Homophobia in the Brokeback Mountain Corpus”

Friday 2–3:15 Demi-Plenary I

A (Evergreen) Name Change: The Western Culture Association

Chair: Ann Ronald, University of Nevada, Reno

Ann Ronald, University of Nevada, RenoMelody Graulich, Utah State University
Susan Bernardin, SUNY, OneontaAlicia Garza, Boise State UniversityLaurie Ricou, University of British ColumbiaCharles Crow, Bowling Green State University

B (White) Teaching in Place

Chair: Jacky O’Connor, Boise State University

Karen Ramirez, University of Colorado, Boulder: “Place Matters: Simon Ortiz’s From Sand Creek and the Development of a Place-Based Pedagogy”
Janis Johnson, University of Idaho, & Georgia Grady Johnson, University of Idaho: “Pedagogy of Place: Learning on Tribal Land”
Lisa Slappey, Rice University: “Teaching on Buffalo Bayou: An Urban Pedagogy of Community and Environment”

Friday 4:45–6 (River Fork & Rapids) WLA 40th Birthday Reception

Friday 6–11 (Evergreen) WLA Awards Banquet & Dance

Saturday, 28 October

8–noon (Aspen) Book Exhibit

Saturday 8–9:15 Session Nine

9A (Evergreen) Reading Desert Women: Williams, Austin, Meloy

Chair: Susanne Bloomfield, University of Nebraska, Kearney

Alf Seegert, University of Utah: “Loving the Land Without Becoming the Land: The Intimate Distance of Place-Connectedness in Mary Austin and Terry Tempest Williams”
Nicole Sheets, University of Utah: “Redirecting Appetites in The Anthropology of Turquoise”
Paul Wilson, University of Utah: “Biological Essentialism and Ellen Meloy’s The Anthropology of Turquoise”
Sharon A. Reynolds, Palomar College: “Downhome Eloquence in the Southwest: Ellen Meloy’s Prose of Place”

9B (Cedar) History, Memory, and Cather’s Fiction

Chair: Evelyn Funda, Utah State University

Timothy Bintrim, Saint Vincent College: “Sublime Blizzards in the Fiction of Willa Cather and Annie Prey”
Amanda Kuhnel, University of Nebraska, Lincoln: “O Pioneers! and Compassionate Agriculture”
Chris Kemp, Wichita State University: “Children of the Moon: The Search for Kinship and the Power of Memory in the Novels of Willa Cather”
Matthew Lavin, Utah State University: “Competing Characterizations Coalesce; or, Collier's Restores Tom Outland's Out West Self Esteem”

9C (Rapids) Stegner, Abbey, Lopez

Chair: Matt Burkhart, University of Arizona

Dynette Reynolds, University of Utah: “Moon-Eyed Professors: The Different Wildernesses of Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner”
Matthew Heimburger, University of Utah: “The Gospel of St. Edward Abbey: Desert Solitaire as Holy and Unholy Writ”
Matt Burkhart, University of Arizona: “Writing Magic Carpets into Navajo Country? Reckoning with Flights of Fancy in Barry Lopez’s Early Fiction”

Linda H. Ross, University of Wyoming: “‘Are We There Yet?’: Immigration in the Western States”
Sarah Wald, Brown University: “Environment, Identity and Mobility in Steinbeck’s TheGrapes of Wrath and Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus”
Stephen Macauley, Utah State University: “Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as a Model for Understanding Diaspora and Movement in the 21st Century”
Susan Naramore Maher, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Far and Near: Setting the Coordinates of Space, Memory, and Identity in Linda Hasselstrom’s Feels Like Far”

Heidi Naylor, Boise State University: “Opening the Chapel Doors: Taking Reader Response from Maxim to Practice”
Alisha Paxton, Utah State University: “Personal Criticism: An Experiment in Narrative”
David Cremean, Black Hills State University: “Mind-ing Waste as We W(a/o)nder; or, Excreta in the West(ern)”

10B (Cedar) Twice-Told Tales and Experimental Narratives

Chair: Leslie Durham, Boise State University

Angela Waldie, University of Calgary: “Klondike Raconteur: Robert Kroetsch’s (Re)citation of ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ in The Man from the Creeks”
Anne L. Kaufman, Milton, Massachusetts: “Stories Move in Herds: Sisters of Grass and Archives of Memory”
Melanie J. Martin, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania: “Myths of Loss, Myths of Power: Disappearing Animals in American Indian Stories”

10C (Rapids) Mary Hallock Foote in Boise

Slideshow and lecture by Judy Austin, Idaho Historical SocietyMembers of the Foote/Old Boise tour are encouraged to attend

10D (White Water) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Steinbeck

Chair: Rodney Rice, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology

Patrick K. Dooley, St. Bonaventure University: “John Steinbeck’s ‘Respect for’ and ‘Respectful Use of Persons’ Ethic in The Grapes of Wrath and Harvest Gypsies”
Daniel Griesbach, University of Washington: “The Red Pony’s Political Unconscious”
Elisa Warford, University of Maryland: “‘And That Feeling Must Go into It’: Sentimentality in The Grapes of Wrath”

10E (River Fork) Memoirs of Class and Consumption

Chair: Nancy Cook, University of Montana

Shay Casey, Idaho State University: “The Original versus the Ordinary: Two Methods of Authentic Western Presentation as seen in No Life for a Lady and The Life of an Ordinary Woman”
Nancy Cook, University of Montana: “Negotiating Class Difference in the American West: Wickenburg, AZ c. 1965”
Paul Bogard, University of Nevada, Reno: “Little House in the Biggest Little City”

Rob Wallace, University of California, Santa Barbara: “‘Born in a Half Savage Country’: Ezra Pound and the West”
Jeffrey Hostetler, Montana State University: “Ben Franklin, Richard Brautigan, and the Death of Nature by Dissection”
Robert Bennett, Montana State University: “‘Underground like a wild potato’: Napoleon Dynamite’s Red-State Blues”